That essential instrument of research--invaluable, despite all its dangers--Fiske estimated more broadly and _justly_ than, perhaps, any other philosopher, certainly than his great master. This makes it singularly pathetic that his premature death should have cut him off from the investigations which have seemed to many leading minds to point to a verification--even to have reached a verification, of the greatest as well as the widest intuition of the ages. If he has risen to a bird's-eye view, or more probably a teloptic consciousness, of what is going on here, it must amuse and cheer him to see that the psychical researchers are not persecuted as the evolutionists were--as he himself was in his youth, but are at worst merely laughed at as a set of inoffensive idiots. Balfour, Crookes, Lodge, and Barrett are among them, and James, Hodgson, Myers, and Sidgwick are passed from among them; and we believe that Fiske and even Spencer, had their lot been cast in these days, would be among the most interested of them. * * * * * We were on the brink of writing that probably most of the readers of this essay will have heard some of those unprecedented lectures and addresses on American History delivered by Fiske during his last twenty years. But we were startled by the realization that almost another twenty years have elapsed since the last of those lectures was delivered, and that a large proportion of our readers were then too young to be interested in them. Some readers perhaps even need to be told that Fiske was the first eminent historian who had a clear conception of the Law of Evolution--so far as a clear conception was then, or is perhaps even now, possible. But his historical works containing those lectures are so well known that it would be as nearly superfluous as it is impracticable to descant upon them here. Though they were published irregularly, they make a continuous narrative from the influences leading to the discovery of America, down to the inauguration of Washington; and many high authorities give them the very first rank, and declare that the author's premature death before bringing them down to his own time is a great loss to the world. Some of his historical lectures were delivered to "the very cream of London," as Huxley said, and to the unbounded enthusiasm of one of them, regarding whom Fiske wrote his wife: